Considerable time and expense are involved in accepting an inmate at a controlled environment facility. In most cases, an individual may be first identified on the street by a member of the police department as having an outstanding warrant for arrest, or may otherwise be taken into custody by police or an officer of the court. The arresting officer may then complete some paperwork identifying the individual, describing the reason for arrest or detention, list any impounded property, etc. This initial information may be collected, for instance, in a patrol car or the like. Thereafter, the arrestee may be transported to a local controlled environment facility such as, for example, police stations, department of corrections, juvenile facilities, municipal or county jails, etc., for further processing and/or incarceration.
In general, there is a period of time when the arrestee is temporarily incarcerated in a controlled environment facility but has not been fully processed as an inmate thereof. For example, the arrestee may have been photographed, fingerprinted, and entered into an initial set of books at the facility, but he or she may not yet have been arraigned (i.e., brought before a judge to hear the charges and to set bail). Before being fully processed into the controlled environment facility, an arrestee may go through a classification process, medical examination, hygienic processing (e.g., shower and delousing), etc. In connection with these procedures, staff members may be required to complete a file in an inmate management system.
In some situations, the arrestee may be placed in a temporary holding cell. Often the law requires that arrestees be given access to a telephone for placing one or more calls to seek assistance from someone outside of the controlled environment facility, such as a friend or family member, an attorney, a bail bondsman, etc. Today, local controlled environment facilities such as police stations and the like may not monitor, control, or even charge for those calls, particularly when the calls originate from holding cells. Typically, only the first call made by the arrestee must be provided free of charge. Nonetheless, local facilities do not ordinarily have the means to charge for subsequent calls, or even limit the amount of calls made a particular arrestee. As a result, the arrestee's phone calls are often provided as free service and without any control or monitoring.
Furthermore, after the arrestee becomes an inmate of a first controlled environment facility, he or she is oftentimes transferred to a second such facility. These transfers may take place, for example, based on the expected length of incarceration, jurisdiction where the crime took place, type of crime committed, etc. For instance, an inmate may be temporarily held at a local police station, and then moved to a county jail. After residing within the county jail for a period of time, the inmate may then be moved to a state or federal prison. Today each police, county, state, and federal authority implements its own inmate data collection and management system. Therefore, at each step in the inmate's incarceration history beginning with his or her arrest up until his or her last transfer, redundant information is gathered and processed by each facility. The information collected by these different facilities is not connected in any way, and investigators must visit or contact each such entity when seeking information related to a single case or person.